This invention relates to a submersible vehicle.
According to the invention there is provided a submarine comprising a plurality of rigid submersible vessels coupled by resilient couplings.
Hitherto it has been difficult to provide a large submarine. When submerged the submarine which is essentially a tube with the ends capped is subject to external hydrostatic pressure. To prevent crushing of the tube the walls must be thick. The greater the diameter of the tube the thicker the walls need to be. A smaller diameter tube can be thinner but of course needs to be longer to have the same volume. While the same amount of material or indeed slightly for the same internal volume more may be required with the smaller tube, it is much easier to manipulate and form thin plate than thick. However a large volume submarine of small diameter will be very long since halving the diameter of a tube reduces its volume by a factor of four. A very long thin conventional submarine would be difficult to control.
Reference may be made to U.S. Pat. No. 3,809,002 in which there is disclosed a number of small submarines joined end to end which at least partly meet the above problem. However for such an arrangement to be practical, it is necessary to accurately control and navigate the various components of the submarine.